Work Prayer

Holy Mary, you worked in your home. You baked bread, drew water from the well and wove garments. Holy Joseph, you labored in your shop building yokes and tables. Both of you performed these humble duties, duties equal in value and dignity. Throughout the day you worked hand-in-hand with prayer. You also had noble vocations: marriage and parenthood. You were graced to chastely love each other and to love and raise the Almighty’s only Son, Jesus, our Lord and Savior.

As you grew, Blessed Jesus, you played, studied and did chores. Saint Joseph’s carpentry trade gradually became your full-time profession. For years, you toiled with wood, inhaling dust, tasting sweat, and blistering your hands. You planned projects and calculated costs while listening to customers’ complaints and compliments. This vocation was of sublime significance: By engaging in labor You blessed each and every man and woman’s days of earnest creating and serving. As with all of Your life, You subtly elevated our human condition, combining the practicality of earning wages with the stateliness of human work, living a hidden life of integrity and obscurity … until the closing hour came for You to finish the Father’s greatest work order: to climb a hill in a beaten state and permitting us to hammer nails into Your calloused hands and feet. After this blackest of nights, after forty hours, after one day of rest, Your Spirit beckoned, “Arise, My Love!” And work began again.

Risen Jesus Christ, please grant (Name) the work he/she needs. How they yearn to be like You in following our Father’s plan and providing for their family and him/herself! Caesar wants his rendering and the temporal world revolves by industry and capital. Utilizing all of their abilities, (Name)’s schooling and talents and their will to do more than merely exist, spurs them to diligently seek employment. Yet the lures of avarice and exploitation, self-debasement and discouragement may tempt. At that moment remind them how even our Father’s hired workers have more than enough provisions.

Breathe right judgment into (Name) so our Father’s affectionate will may swiftly be revealed. May he/she finally awaken to a meaningful career merged with prayer, receiving just pay and thus enabling him/her to fully live, share and be.

And hour-by-hour, before the sun sets on our retirement date, Master Carpenter, craft us into Your splendid third-day image. Amen.